Hopefully, someone over there at the O is listening. Your assessment of Google is spot on. They have made the system virtually idiot proof, as evidenced by my use of it.

I used to work at a paper that lamented the emergence of craigslist and ebay (to a lesser degree) as leading to a sharp decline in classified revenue. Ads migrated elsewhere as a result too.

I don't know that their excuse is totally crap, because newspapers have to adapt to this very real trend, but I guess the point is that some are doing a better job then others.

But if this google service were so obvious as you make it sound then why wouldn't the O go this way? Care to offer up a guess?

It isn't just the Oregonian, either. The New York Times and Washington Post and many others are losing money. One thing they are never willing to consider is their editorial and news content.

Although the lifeblood of a paper is ad revenue, ad revenue is partly driven by subscriber and circulation rates. Those numbers are declining year after year. These various papers always blame the internet and online stuff, but refuse to consider how they have editorialized the news stories as a factor.

I personally work with five different people who have canceled subscriptions over the Oregonian's overwhelming left slant.

The series they have been running about the Tea Party movement is a good example. In the one from Tuesday the O's story in paragraph five and six put in a complete thematic non-sequitur about white-supremacists whose only connection to the TEA group was that they existed 12 years ago in the same geographic region. My wife even commented on how the story writers were cleverly trying to tar the current group with the actions of an unrelated group. Of course it was a New York Times article, which is even more extreme left than the Oregonian, but this one example times thousands more adds up to people not believing the newspapers are free of agenda and so they cancel their subscriptions.

The only newspaper with growth and in the black consistently is a middle-of-the-road paper, The Wall Street Journal.

I am sure that the majority of the people here on BO don't think the Oregonian or the NYT is a lefty paper, but, rest assured, most of America does.

So I believe they could reduce or reverse their hemorrhaging readership by going back to "All the News that's Fit to Print" instead of "All the News that Fits our Agenda."

KenRay: you're right that "ad revenue is driven partly by subscriber and circulation rates". So is a newspaper's expense column - printing and delivery costs are enormous. In fact - since most advertising is sold by the column inch, not the readership - a decline in circulation can be to a newspaper's financial advantage, if the expense declines are higher than the (resulting) ad revenue declines. And, a sudden increase in circulation can play havoc with the bottom line if marginal expense outpaces marginal ad revenue. I think - don't know, since I no longer work there, just "think" - that's what The O is in the process of trying to figure out - where the right balance is.

That said, Kari's initial post is spot on - and points to a larger problem than "right sizing" the revenue and expense sides of the ledger.

If CraigsList and Ebay provide better service at less cost than do Oregonian classified ads - and they do - then the newspaper needs to find new revenue sources.

Their problem is exacerbated by the saturation of modern society with easy to consume electronic media. Most people are unwilling or unable to do much reading. This is bad for the intellectual strength of modern America, but it's not going away.

Those who do internet advertising well will likely survive. If the Oregonian does not adapt, it will likely perish or end up looking more like Willamette Week - or The Downtowner, probably.

The O has a left slant? That's why they endorsed George W. Bush and rather savagely opposed Measures 66 & 67? And why they carry not only routine conservative Washington insiders like George Will, but also way-out rightists like Victor Davis Hanson (I think that's his name) and others like him on the op-ed page?

I think the O news coverage is mostly fact-based, and often very good, as on BETC recently, though some say that facts are liberal. And if using NY Times stories makes the O left, then that means the whole corporate media are left too. Not likely.

And if using NY Times stories makes the O left, then that means the whole corporate media are left too.

Yes, my point exactly. And you also proved my other point that most on here wouldn't notice the left slant anymore than a fish notices the water they swim in.

The denial you speak is in those newsrooms, also.

So Kenray thinks the entire media is on the left, but he doesn't think he's on the right for believing that?

KenRay:

Oregon voters overwhelmingly voted for Barack Obama, and voters have sent Democrats to Salem to form the biggest legislative majority in decades.

By all accounts, the Oregonian should have a somewhat leftward slant, because that is the viewpoint of the majority of readers.

However, the publisher and the leadership are dinosaurs. Elite, out-of-touch good old boys from another era, who refuse evolve with the times. Their biggest advertisers are auto dealerships and other members of the good old boy network, and the O has chosen to stick to their corporatists roots all the way to the bitter end.

Nearly every editorial decision, and many newsroom decisions are calculated to push the interests of corporate lobbyists and the wealthy elite of our state.

The fact that the Oregon has such an outrageous conservative bias is not only unmistakable to any reasonable observer, it simply stands to reason.

You assert the Oregonian has a leftward slant, which is so absurd as to invite any reasonable person to question your sanity or you honesty or both. But I'll bite. In your mind, what do the good old boys leading the Oregonian stand to gain from having a leftward bias? What could possibly motivate them to distance themselves from their wealthy corporate advertisers? What would cause the O to support politicians that will ask wealthy people like the Oregonian's leadership and their major advertisers to pay their fair share of taxes?

I know that you people insulate yourselves from any facts that don't correspond to your insane worldview, so when some of those unwanted facts slip through your filters you have to find an excuse to ignore them. What I would really like to know is, how do you people think this leftward bias came about? What's causing it? Why do you imagine these elite corporate bosses insist on pushing policies that are against their own narrow interests, and also against the narrow interests of their elite corporate advertisers? How does that make sense?

So, ultimately, it boils down to this: the Oregonian has not kept up with the times, and rather fix it, they'll just keep doing what they have been doing so far.

Right. That always works well.

It is incredibly frustrating that the leading newsgathering organization in Oregon has such a crappy website. How can a supposedly high technology-driven state not have a decent site to be a central repository and notification point of contact? If Kari is right about the management, it is pure incompetence that they don't realize a very valuable resource and decent business proposition in their midst. OregonLive is run like a permanent second thought.

I rarely agree with you, but this was a great article. Unfortunately, the Oregonian is not alone. Many web sites ignore the obvious benefits of outsourcing their ad sales to networks in order to maximize perceived value.

There are other options beyond Google, but Google has critical mass in the long tail.

Bottom line is that newspapers are struggling already. To under utilize a potential profit resource borders on malpractice.

It's really very simple. If you are good at content - do content. Let someone who is good at selling and serving ads handle that part of your business. Plug it into your site, forget about it and collect the money. Plus you don't have to pay someone on staff to sell ad space.

Thanks for this. I hope someone -- well, someone who has the power to do something -- at The Oregonian reads this.

I was a web developer and online content creator in a former life, and I still don't get OregonLive.com. I keep thinking it's a pre-beta version that's only temporarily live.

I very much want to support my local media outlets, but it has to make sense to do so. I'm pulling for The Oregonian and am hopeful they can turn this around, improving the printed paper as well as their online presence. And it's going to have to happen soon....

The world has moved on. Newspapers have not. Too bad for them, and too bad for those of us who like to hold a piece of paper in our hands as we savor our Sunday morning cup of coffee.

Next?

To Humphrey:

I make it a point not to respond to people who use the term "you people", especially after having pejorative terms attached.

Are we ever going to learn what BO's ad revenue goes for?

This is not just the Oregonian. Stupd thinking, "around here we do things different" and plutocrats are strangling American business. The boomers learned not to unconditionally worship the almighty dollar, and in their wake we have gens X and Y only valuing "what fraud have you committed for me lately".

Add to that the "LA DA's Office" effect. When you do a crap job 24/7, and run you business as mentioned, you can't simply "do it right" by snapping your fingers. People always ask why LA can't get it right in high profile cases. It's not that they don't try, but you can't suddenly demonstrate competence that you may have even once possessed, at the drop of a hat. So they fuck it up.

Finally, there are people that will always wnat hard copy doc over online media. What people seem to forget is that the opposite camp exists too.

I'd like to also pile on OregonLive.com. It is complete rubbish. I know staffers at the Oregonian read NYTimes.com, WSJ.com and everyother publication on-line. Why does The Oregonian continue to allow themselves to be represented by such a cruddy on-line presence? Additionally, why do they continue to call it "OregonLive.com"? It doesn't exactly extend their brand awareness, does it?

I always thought the Oregonian's problem was that they pursued that intangible thing known as "balance" in their coverage. That's why when a local media covers some new expansion of public transit, they always get a quotation from the Cascade Policy Institute, a conservative "think-tank" which is otherwise never heard from. In the Oregonian's case, because upper management thinks their editorial staff are "liberal", they aggressively balance their influence with whatever conservative talking head they can find, whether the person can write anything worth reading or not. (That must be why they kept Rheinhold around for years. If not that, then it was for even less savory reasons.)

After reading this, I'm amazed that the problem is worst than I thought; I never thought I was unreasonably positive when it came to how the Oregonian operated. They really are in trouble over there, & I'm not in the least upset I dropped my subscription to the Fri-Sat-Sun option. (It's the same price as Sunday only, which is full of the coupons my wife looks for -- which is why I don't drop it entirely.)

Geoff

Yeah, bandwagon jumper.

1. OregonLive.com is terrible, like everybody else has already complained. It's pretty sad that a site that should be a premiere source of Oregon news is so unequivocally awful. Maybe they should fire the ad reps, as Kari is suggesting, and hire a firm to work on UI and search.

2. The content just isn't there. People call it the Boregonian for a reason. I don't buy the paper and long ago stopped visiting OregonLive not only because of the site being simply bad, but also because there is nothing but the latest car chase, shooting, etc. sprinkled with an occasional "human interest" story or puff piece, and the rest of the eye-bleeding home page is wall to wall sports. Including -high school- sports, of all things. My interest in reading any of this so-called "news:" zero.

3. This is [citation needed], but over on the Willamette Week article about the layoff, somebody pointed out that many of the ads in the print edition of the O are targetted at seniors, and that among under-30s, the WWeek beats the Oregonian! I'd like to see a cite on that, but it's entirely plausible to me. This isn't a problem with the under 30 crowd, it's a problem with the Oregonian. They need to fix it, or they will eventually die off along with their readers.

The Oregonian deserves to die. I say let's resurrect the Oregon Journal. I used to be a daily subscriber.

Found Kari's answer interesting/informative. Can't resist a follow on question, from purely professional interest, are the ads. done on a PP click or PPM basis?

I think the original question, that Kari raises is a very interesting one, and don't really see that it has been answered. I've wondered why radio stations with an internet presence don't go the way of Google. It's monumentally unproductive for me, living in Portland, to be spammed for bovine parasite treatment, formulated for Western Australia. It would be a straightforward strategy to insert geocode based adverts. In the 21st century a number of radio stations are now broadcasting more to the world than locals. Time the got with it. Hey, I think I've a new business idea!

Of course you could ask why TV hasn't realized this either. I spend a lot of time with South Africans and SA sites, and I am constantly staggered by the ratings numbers for American daytime TV everywhere. One really has to wonder when Oprah is lecturing the audience on what it means to be black if she realizes that the bulk of her viewing audience are black South Africans. Anyway, with digital TV, why not go to geocoded adverts as well?

I've also wondered why magazines don't put out local editions. Tell me that "Mother Jones - Portland Edition" wouldn't be a best seller. Things like Utne Reader probably couldn't be improved, though.

But instead, the O continues to dwindle. Hate to have to fall back on my standard theory, that most media is controlled by people that want to stop things from happening, more than they want to educate and inform. It may be that they just can't change gears.